Acting on the ideological position that teachers are the root of all evil, and with the full support of the city's Latino mayor, the LA school board has voted to transfer one-third of its schools to private, charter management – including 50 brand new campuses. Corporate outsourcing now passes as education policy.

Outsource It! Privatize It! LA School Reform in the Age of Obama

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

“The LA schools handover may represent the biggest one-shot giveaway of public school property in history.”

The Los Angeles Board of Education has voted overwhelmingly to outsource the operations of about one-third of the district's schools, a huge blow to the very concept of public education in the nation's second largest city. The scheme would allow private charter operators to take control of over 250 schools, including 50 brand new, multi-million dollar campuses. The great giveaway to private contractors was approved by a six-to-one vote, with the enthusiastic support of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Two hundred of the schools to be placed on the auction block are classified as “underperforming.” The 50 new school campuses that are up for grabs were paid for by the public through construction bonds. The purpose was to relieve overcrowding, but now the spanking new buildings are to be put up for bids by private charter companies. That's an illegal giveaway of public resources, say opponents of the turnover. The teachers union agrees, and is exploring legal strategies to block the outsourcing. Under California state law, charter schools don't have to hire union workers.

If it goes through, the LA schools handover may represent the biggest one-shot giveaway of public school property in history. The 50 recently constructed schools alone are the equivalent of a big city school district, all brand new and just out of the box, giving the charter operators a huge, built-in physical plant advantage over the city's traditional public schools.

The transfer of one-third of LA's public schools to charter operation means the city will no longer be able to claim to have a truly city-wide public school system. In this, LA will come to resemble New Orleans, where charter privateers now dominate the school infrastructure, and accountability for the system as a whole is non-existent. Veteran teachers have been replaced, wholesale, by young, non-union novices.

“LA will come to resemble New Orleans, where charter privateers now dominate the school infrastructure.”

In New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina blew in the charter school takeover. In Chicago, the driving force was corporate elements of the Democratic Party. Massive imposition of charter schools has led to grossly disproportionate terminations of Chicago's Black teachers, replaced mostly by white youngsters from outside the city.

The corporate world, which cares a great deal about the salaries of its executives and consultants, blames unionized teachers for the decline in big city public schools – an ideological position with no basis in measurable reality. Suburban teachers are just as likely to be unionized as inner city teachers, but we don't see suburban communities describing teachers as the root of all evil. And we can't even imagine a white, suburban district hundreds millions of dollars to build a whole generation of brand new schools – and then turning the buildings over to private contractors to do with as they please. That's inconceivable.

Outsourcing of public education only occurs in overwhelmingly Black and brown school districts, places where, like in Los Angeles, public property and public responsibility to students is put on the private auction block.

Charter schools are NOT public schools. I have no respect for con artists like Duncan and Obama who use the political concept of "reform" as a means to get rid of democratically elected, school boards. They can't be honest with the people, because the people, with overwhelming force, would shut down their anti-democratic activities.

And
Along with the perfect example of suburban public schools- if our unionized, college educated, public workforce a.k.a teachers were really the problem, shouldn't they (corporate protectionists) be blaming the universities that gave them their bachelor, master, and doctorate degrees?

Being slavish to Standardized Tests and more significantly tying public school funding to standardized tests is nothing but rank racist and class-driven bullshit. How in the hell did we end up IMO institutionalizng the Bell Curve? How is that Dems and so-called Progressives have bought into this horseshit? This evil, vapid notion that test scores are sole predictors? Some of the greatest minds and thinkers in our time, Black, White or otherwise, were high school drops who were bright, but who used prison to take their intellectual thirst and journey to a higher level. Both Ted Turner and Bill Gates were college drop outs as were many of the Black Renaissance and so on.

As someone who perforrmed well on standardized tests and who also has adjunct teaching experience, I assure you that standardized tests are not the be all and end all of intellectual capacity or achievement. I admire Ted Kennedy, but he should have left this "No Child Left Behind" social engineering that is appended to the Bell Curve on the dung heap.

Sparking a child's intellectual curiosity or artistic bent is what education should be about. Not grooming them to some goddamn test that is a false identifer of achievement both in the teaching ranks or in the classroom.

Last, nobody seems to have made a connection in the explosion and institutionalization of "testing" to Kaplan Enterprises now wholly owned by the Washington Post and, I might add, one of their largest revenue makers. The paper isn't worth a shit as all their editorial pages do is parrot the warmongers and statists. This isn't about education, as always, it's about money, conformity, class status, and racial engineering.

As someone who perforrmed well on standardized tests and who also has adjunct teaching experience, I assure you that standardized tests are not the be all and end all of intellectual capacity or achievement.

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